What's your approach to tracking Scrum team progress with stakeholders?

Collaborate with your stakeholders. Put them in one meeting and make decisions on what matters together. It will result in buy-in, common understanding and better results. If you don't manage this before starting, it will backfire. Better to face the bull heads-on and grab it by its horns.

Understanding your stakeholders involves identifying who they are, what their interests and concerns are, and how they define success for the project. This means engaging with them early on to learn about their expectations, priorities, and preferred communication styles. By tailoring your communication to meet their needs, you can ensure that they are kept informed and satisfied with the project’s progress. Regularly revisiting these discussions helps to adapt to any changes in their requirements or concerns.

Stakeholders should not be interested in tracking a Scrum team's progress, they should be more interested in the outcomes the team is achieving.

When communicating with the scrum team don’t focus on the deadline, focus on the work. A sprint team defines a sprint time, it does not agree to having all the work completed by the end of the sprint. It is an estimate. If we keep asking developers, “will you have this done by tomorrow, or next week”, we are focussing on the deadline not the work. Instead, focus on the work. Ask “how much work is left?”. Then we can make a good estimate if the work will fall within a deadline. By focussing on the work and not the deadline, we remove urgency and increase confidence, making the overall productivity increase.

Invite the stakeholders for a sprint retrospective and you will be amazed on the results. Improve the expectations after every sprint to ensure team have the right mindset of agile. Frequent feedback from such sessions will improve the collaboration on both sides which builds trust. The reason why stakeholders support is bad is because there is no trust amongst all.

Choosing relevant metrics and indicators is crucial for providing stakeholders with meaningful insights into the Scrum team’s progress. These metrics might include velocity (the amount of work completed in a sprint), sprint burndown charts (tracking the remaining work in a sprint), and release burndown charts (tracking the progress towards a major release). Additionally, quality indicators such as defect rates and customer satisfaction scores can offer a more comprehensive view of the project’s health. The key is to select metrics that align with the stakeholders’ goals and provide a clear picture of progress and potential issues.

Choosing relevant metrics and indicators involves selecting those that truly reflect the team’s progress and the project’s health. Metrics such as sprint velocity, burn-down charts, and release burndown can provide insights into team performance and predictability. These metrics should be chosen based on stakeholder needs and the nature of the project to ensure they offer meaningful information.

An effective way to brief senior executives is a dashboard with traffic lights, a brief description and next steps or actions per topic. A green light shows all is on track, yellow would signal there are impediments that can be fixed without help of the stakeholders, and a red light flags such help is needed. Points of attention can be deepened in slides or in other means. Remember to convey the key message first and supporting arguments later.

Using visual and interactive tools can significantly enhance the way you track and communicate progress. Tools such as Jira, Trello, or Azure DevOps allow for real-time tracking of tasks and sprint progress. Visual aids like charts, graphs, and dashboards make it easier for stakeholders to grasp complex data quickly. Interactive features enable stakeholders to drill down into details and explore specific areas of interest. Regularly updating these tools ensures that stakeholders have access to the latest information at all times.

Provide stakeholders with access to relevant project management tools or dashboards where they can track progress in real-time. Ensure that these reports are easy to understand and include relevant information such as completed tasks, remaining work, and any impediments faced - they appreciate speaking in plain language.

Effectivement, les tableaux de bords et les outils de gestion de projet aident le scrum master à suivre les progrès de l’équipe scrum

Even more important than the tool used, it's important to be transparent with stakeholders. If there are blockers it is best to share that upfront and keep stakeholders in the loop. Stakeholders want to know if their priority items are being worked on and if those items will be done according to their timeline - everything else is noise.

Being honest and transparent is crucial for building trust with stakeholders. This means reporting both the successes and the challenges the team faces. When issues arise, provide clear explanations and outline the steps being taken to address them. Transparency ensures stakeholders are fully aware of the project’s status and can make informed decisions.

To begin, transparency and honesty are essential foundations for trust-building, crucial for fostering healthy collaboration. Moreover, they aid in establishing clear expectations and visibility, facilitating informed decision-making with all pertinent information at hand. When facing situations like delayed deliveries, having full awareness of the implications makes handling them much easier.

Watch out for watermelon reporting, where everything is green on the outside, but it's actually red on the inside. Explain that surprises are likely, and that they may alter the complete playing field.

Seeking feedback and improvement involves actively inviting stakeholders to share their thoughts on the reporting process and the project’s direction. Regularly scheduled review meetings and retrospectives can help gather this feedback. This practice not only enhances stakeholder satisfaction but also provides valuable insights that can drive continuous improvement in both the product and the process.

If my experience, if you ask for feedback be prepared to implement it or at the very least explain why you are not implementing the stakeholder's suggestions. Don't just waste everyone's time getting that feedback and then completely ignore it.

There are several additional considerations when tracking Scrum team progress with stakeholders. First, maintain regular communication, ideally through structured touchpoints such as sprint reviews and demos. Second, adapt your communication style and tools to suit different stakeholders, recognizing that some may prefer detailed reports while others may favor high-level summaries. Third, be proactive in anticipating and addressing potential concerns before they escalate. Finally, align progress tracking with the overall strategic goals of the organization to ensure the project delivers maximum value.

Instead of us vs them, make it our progress. Frame it in terms of, what can we do to make more progress or speed things up. The moment it becomes us, the ones delivering, vs them, the ones expecting something, it will result in a lot of frustration. Things take longer than expected. That's the nature of the work. No need to bully others because of flawed and imprecise expectations due to the fallible nature of estimates. It's your job to manage this up front.